Conditions pour une histoire multipolaire des littératures de langue française

Abstract

French literary history has been studied from a national perspective since the creation of the discipline in the late 19th century. But the focus on national literature has excluded literatures written in French outside France. Nowadays, important essays on French literary history are still centered on the literature of the Hexagon. Of course, ‘Francophone’ studies have been considering literatures of various Francophone areas, but they have often paid attention to the literary works and movements of specific territories, without placing them in relation with other literary works written in French. Studies of comparative literature and world literature have created models for studying interactions between different literatures. Some are focused on the diffusion of literature across the world; other examine how cultural phenomena in the colonial margins have influenced the metropoles or ‘written back’ to them; others analyze world literature in a relational or ‘trans-area’ perspective. After having reviewed such methodological approaches, this paper suggests a model based on the study of frontieres (i.e. “borders” and “boundaries”) chosen as a “point of departure” (Auerbach) for setting up a fragmentary literary history which gives the same weight to the various literatures written in French in the 20th century.